NA TURAL HISTORY OF SEVENTEENTH CENT. 237 



of note who ever appeared among the Romans. His "Natural His- 

 tory" is a compilation from all the authors known in his time, and it 

 includes every branch of natural knowledge recognized by the an- 

 cients. The work is divided into thirty-seven books, of which several 

 contain accounts of plants. The number of species mentioned is 

 upwards of six hundred, but the descriptions are by no means accu- 

 rate. Like his predecessors, he treats particularly of plants employed 

 in medicine. The attempts made in the sixteenth century by com- 

 mentators to make out the plants described by these ancient authors, 

 proved so unsatisfactory that physicians began themselves to examine 

 and collect plants, and their published catalogues soon showed that 

 so far from the ancients having enumerated all the species of plants, 

 they had in reality described only a comparatively small number. 

 Until the time of KONRAD GESNER (1516 1565), however, no at- 

 tempt was made to methodically arrange the plants described. Gesner, 

 who was professor of Natural History at Zurich about the year 1555, 

 first suggested the division of plants into classes, orders, genera, and 

 species, and this kind of division has been followed by botanists 

 ever since : although various grounds of division have been proposed, 

 Gesner selected fat flowers and fat fruit as the parts of the plant on 

 which the classification was to be based. 



Gesner was also the author of a book in which he describes and 

 represents by figures the shapes of fossil shells, and of the crystalline 

 forms of many minerals. 



ANDREA C^ESALPINUS (1519 1603), a physician, and professor of 

 botany at the University of Padua, proposed a classification of plants 

 founded on the characters of their fruits or seeds. His descriptions 

 are excellent, and include about fifteen hundred species of plants. 

 His method does not appear to have been generally accepted, and by 

 the end of the sixteenth century a great number of writings on plants 

 had been published; but the whole subject was thrown into confusion 

 by the various names given to the sa>ne plants by different authors. 

 This state of things was in a great measure remedied by the labours of 

 two brothers, named BAUHIN (JOHN, 1541 1613; GASPARD, 1560 

 1624), natives of Switzerland, one of whom published in 1623 a 

 systematical index, in which might be found all the names under which 

 different authors had described each plant. 



When the Royal Society of London was founded, one of its declared 

 objects was the advancement of botanical science, and for this pur- 

 pose persons were engaged to collect plants, etc., in England and in 

 foreign countries. But before this period some botanists had laboured 

 in England. The first British Flora was published by How in 1650, 

 describing one thousand two hundred species, and in 1667 Dr. MERRET 

 issued his work on the "Vegetables, Animals, and Fossils of Britain." 

 In this the number of species of British plants is increased to one 

 thousand four hundred. Many distinguished botanical writers ap- 



